Sir Fraser Stoddart Professor

Affiliations

Board of Trustees; Director of the Center for Chemistry of Integrated Systems

Research Statement

The academic career of Fraser Stoddart can be traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the Windy City beside Lake Michigan with interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield beside Lake Ontario, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, in the Midlands of the Heartland of Albion, and in the City of the Angels beside the Peaceful Sea. He has been a member of the faculty at Northwestern University since 2008. He is a Board of Trustees Professor and Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems. His research interests are in chemistry beyond the molecule, which, combined with his interest in templation, has led to the template-directed synthesis, based on molecular recognition and self-assembly processes, of a wide range of mechanically interlocked molecules, bistable variants of which have found their way in the form of switches into molecular electronic devices and drug delivery systems. In terms of molecular structure, his research straddles the size regime from the mesomolecular scale all the way up to the nanoscopic, microscopic and macroscopic levels: it includes wholly synthetic polymers and metal-organic frameworks. He also embraces radical chemistry in both the supramolecular and mechanostereochemical domains.